A Caterpillar on the Leaf

For most of his long publishing career, Rae Desmond Jones’ poetry has specialised in precisely observed social and political phenomena. People and their often anti-social impulses as acted out in tension with their social context has given his poetry a capacity to unsettle and disturb, despite his capacity to portray the comic aspects of his subject’s humanity. In A Caterpillar On The Leaf, the Ghazal form allows him to explore deeper intuitive elements in his poetry not usually obvious before, but evident in his short novella Wisdom (published Blackwattle Press, Sydney 1995). These 50 poems are a record of a gifted narrative poet turning away from narrative in order to contemplate the deep psychological bases of literary and scientific meaning.